Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) continues to prove one of President Donald Trump’s most passionate allies even though during Trump’s rise to power, he consistently denounced him as unfit for office. This weekend on CBS’s Face The Nation, Graham acknowledged that Trump’s economic antagonism of China is having some negative effects on Americans and that more negative effects could be on the way… but he said that Americans should basically just shut up and take it. He wants the businesses behind a recently estimated $3.4 billion loss to the tariffs going back and forth from the U.S. to China to just keep quiet and carry on.
As he put it to host Margaret Brennan:
‘Every Democrat and every Republican of note has said China cheats. The Democrats for years have been claiming that China should be stood up to. Now Trump is, and we just gotta accept the pain that comes with standing up to China. How do you get China to change without creating some pain on them and us? I don’t know.’
TRADE WAR: “We just got to accept the pain” that comes with standing up to China, @LindseyGrahamSC tells @margbrennan. Adds, “how do you get China to change without creating some pain on them and us? I don’t know.” pic.twitter.com/SVYlU6voOn
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 25, 2019
He added:
‘We’re now at that part in the trade war where you feel price increases at Walmart… I’d tell him, you know what, Mr. President — listen. You’ve got a lot more bullets than they do. They sell us a lot more stuff than we sell them, and the goal is to get them to change their behavior.’
Acknowledging that China has engaged in unfair trade practices like intellectual property theft does not necessitate supporting the harsh tariffs that Trump has and continues to impose.
TRADE WAR IMPACT: @LindseyGrahamSC tells @margbrennan “We’re now at that part in the trade war where you feel price increases at Walmart.” pic.twitter.com/Tsu70NWlEV
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 25, 2019
CNN’s Brianna Keilar went over this with top Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow on national television just this weekend when he tried to insist that comments from U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson against tariffs had been taken out of context. Kudlow’s reasoning was that separate from their explicitly, clearly stated opposition to Trump’s tariffs, Johnson and other world leaders had acknowledged that Chinese trade policies needed to be taken on. But the two things — confronting unfairness and imposing tariffs — are not inexorably linked. Supporting one doesn’t mean we should just retreat to our hideaways and wait for the storm from the other to pass, Lindsey.
The newest escalation in the trade war came via a five percent increase on all currently in-place tariffs on imported Chinese goods that Trump imposed this past Friday. That came hours after China announced their own plans for yet another round of tariffs ranging from five to ten percent on this time some $75 million worth of American goods. Trump recently paused plans for newly targeting large quantities of Chinese goods with import taxes in what was billed as an effort to protest the Christmas shopping season — but an escalation quickly came anyway.
The United States has been pursuing some kind of trade deal with China, but that has definitively not materialized yet. During his own Sunday tv appearance, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that “we’re not making progress” with China. Kudlow added that he couldn’t verify a deal would be in place by the 2020 elections, which are about a year and a half down the road. Graham’s solution is just for Americans to buckle up or something.
Featured Image via screenshot
